Utopianism and Prefiguration
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This item was submitted to Loughborough's Research Repository by the author. Items in Figshare are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Utopianism and prefiguration PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION https://cup.columbia.edu/book/political-uses-of-utopia/9780231179591 PUBLISHER © Columbia University Press VERSION AM (Accepted Manuscript) LICENCE CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 REPOSITORY RECORD Kinna, Ruth. 2019. “Utopianism and Prefiguration”. figshare. https://hdl.handle.net/2134/19278. Utopianism and Prefiguration Ruth Kinna For anarchists, utopias are about action. As Uri Gordon argues, utopias are “umbilically connected to the idea of social revolution”.1 The kind of action utopia describes is a matter of debate. This essay examines how utopian thinking shapes anarchist thought and highlights some recent shifts in the political uses of utopia. Utopianism is not treated as an abstract concept or method, nor as a literary genre or place – because that is not how anarchists have understood the idea. Utopia, Gordon notes, “has always meant something more than a hypothetical exercise in designing a perfect society”. As a revolutionary idea, utopia is instead linked to the principle of prefiguration. Prefiguration has been identified as a core concept in contemporary anarchist thinking and it is increasingly invoked to highlight the distinctiveness of anarchist practices, actions and movements. In 2011, two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber identified prefigurative politics as one of the movement’s four characteristically anarchist principles, the other three being direct action, illegalism and the rejection of hierarchy. Hinting at the utopianism of the concept, he described Occupy as a genuine attempt “to create the institutions of the new society in the shell of the old”. Pursuing the idea, he linked prefiguration to the creation of “democratic General Assemblies”, consensus decision-making and a range of mutual aid, self-help institutions - including “kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres”.2 The 1 Uri Gordon, “Utopia in Contemporary Anarchism” in L. Davis and R. Kinna (eds), Anarchism and Utopianism, (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 2009, p. 260. 2 David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots”, Aljazeera Opinion 30 November 2011 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html. Last access 31 Januaruy 2014. spontaneous emergence of these bodies and practices attested to the practicality of radical aspirations, in ways that might be deemed to be at odds with the traditional idea of utopia as an imaginary realm of ideal non-existence or impossibility. Yet insofar as actions like Occupy expose the flimsiness of official dismissals of egalitarian social change, captured in the mantra TINA, they are also utopian. While there is little dispute about the centrality of prefiguration in anarchist literatures, there is considerable variation about the utopian politics that prefigurative action variously encourages and rules against. The essay shows how blueprint utopianism (associated with the mid-nineteenth century utopian socialists) serves as a foil for contemporary anarchism. It also touches on Abensour’s well-known framing of ‘utopia as desire’ in order to illustrate the dovetailing of anti-utopian utopianism with some recent conceptions of anarchist utopianism. By examining debates about the interrelationship of these two concepts and, in particular, the continuities and discontinuities in the history of anarchist thought, it is possible to capture the spectrum of utopian political practice which prefiguration describes, extending from a utopian commitment to a sociological framing of alternatives to a dystopian embrace of a psychology of desiring. Prefiguration For Benjamin Franks prefiguration is the principle anarchists use to assess the legitimacy of actions and he defines concept in terms of a relationship between ends and means. A core anarchist commitment, he argues, is that “means have to prefigure ends”.3 In normative political theory, the commitment to prefiguration leads anarchists to reject both consequentialism, the idea 3 Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms, (Edinburgh & Oakland: AK Press and Dark Star, 2006), p. 13. that the outcomes of actions are the proper measures of rightness, and deontology which instead considers the justness of actions in terms of duty, or conformity with established norms or laws.4 Prefiguration, Franks argues, steers anarchists towards virtue ethics, a position that grounds morality in character or behaviour and the intentions of actors. In addition, Franks associates prefiguration with what he terms “pragmatic ethics”. This means that anarchists reject instrumentalism, or the principle that “the success of a plan is determined by its efficiency in meeting the objectives”.5 Franks associates instrumentalism with Max Weber. However, his elision of instrumentalism with consequentialism leads him to identify a range of exponents, from J.S. Mill to Lenin, and even to apply it to doctrines which seek to decouple the evaluation of action from considerations of rightness by the substitution of mere “necessity”. Machiavellianism and Nechaevism are examples. In contrast to this broad body of thought, anarchist prefiguration collapses the distinction between means and ends. In terms reminiscent of Gandhi’s anarchist-friendly precept to be the change you wish to see, Franks argues that actions “embody the forms of social relation that actors wish to see develop”.6 The political implications are that everyday behaviours are central to anarchist practice and that the choices individuals make in the conduct of their lives provide a primary locus for anarchist actions. This understanding is echoed by Cindy Milstein. Prefiguration, she argues, is the idea that there should be an ethically consistent relationship between the means and the ends. Means and ends aren’t the same, but anarchists utilize means that point in the direction of their ends. They choose action or projects based on how these fit into longer-terms aims. 4 Franks, pp. 17-18. 5 Franks, p. 101. 6 Franks, p. 114. Anarchists participate in the present in the ways that they would like to participate, much more fully and with much more self-determination, in the future – and encourage others to do so as well. Prefigurative politics thus aligns one’s values to one’s practices ... 7 The priority attached to intention as a standard of rightness is not new in anarchist thought. The nineteenth-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin defended the assassins of Alexander II in 1881 in precisely these terms.8 Similarly, anarchism has long been associated with the rejection of instrumentalism: Weber framed his critique of Tolstoy in terms of the priority anarchists attached to the “ethics of ultimate ends” over the “ethics of responsibility”.9 Yet the term “prefiguration” does not appear in nineteenth century anarchist discourses, at least not commonly. For some contemporary writers this absence is significant and its emergence in the last two decades or so captures sense that there has been a shift in thinking, or perhaps in emphasis, in contemporary anarchist thought in the post-second war period.10 Indeed, some tie the concept tightly to recent activism. The strong association sometimes made between labour organizing and historical anarchism, on the one hand, and the dichotomy between social and lifestyle anarchism, on the other, has encouraged this view (though proponents of prefiguration overwhelmingly reject the 7 Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, (Edinburgh & Oakland/Washington: AK Press/IAS, 2010), p. 68. 8 Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Morality”, in Roger Baldwin (ed), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover Books, 1970), p. 100. 9 On Tolstoy and Weber see Sam Whimster (ed.) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 10 Prefiguration is a familiar term in English-language anarchism but it does not feature in Daniel Colson’s Petit Lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2001). critique of lifestyle that Murray Bookchin advanced when he cemented this distinction).11 To give one example, in “Trying to Occupy Harvard” Philip Cartelli notes: Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, much has been made of its prefigurative politics - an increasingly popular mode of political organization and practice among grassroots movements of the Left over the past half-century that models the kind of democratic society in which they aspire to live. In my experience, however, such radical lifestyle politics are more likely to appeal to activists outside of traditional political groupings such as labor unions or specific issue and policy-oriented organizations.12 Marianne Maeckelbergh offers a similar account, tracking prefiguration through post-war feminism, “the anti-nuclear and peace movements, the racial justice movements in the US, anti- colonial and anti-developmentalism movements in the global South, and later the do-it-yourself and environmental movements―all of which fed into the alterglobalization movement that challenged the right of multilateral organizations (WTO/WB/IMF/G8) to rule the world”.13 In this context prefiguration is an expression of counter-cultural politics which disappeared at the end of the ‘60s to re-emerge in recent anti-capitalist campaigns. And rather than attach